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Canonical Finally Lets Users Move The Unity Launcher To Bottom In Ubuntu 16.04 (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from an article on Softpedia: It is official, the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, due for release on April 21, 2016. Softpedia reported that Ubuntu users might be able to move the Unity7 Launcher at the bottom edge as a rumor in February -- but now they confirm it finally landed for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It is not known if Canonical will implement a visual setting in the Apperance/Behaviour panel for users to easily switch between having the Unity Launcher on the left of at the bottom of the screen for the final release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but you can do it by running a simple command.
Commeny
If it's still spyware then I won't use or recommend Ubuntu.
stuff that matters.
of why I don't use Ubuntu.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
What is so unique about the launcher that it cannot simply be repositioned like any other GUI element? I understand keeping it snapped to an edge of the screen but I'm at a loss to why updates should even be necessary in the first place.
I don't use ubunto so what am I missing?
I cannot believe this has been a feature. Unable to arrange my desktop how I want?...
Why do people tolerate been told what to do?
I can't' drag my non-maximized windows all the way to the top, that is ridiculous!
FRA: STFU GTFO
I quite like ubuntu when used as a base system via a minimal install... doing xorg yourself and choosing your own UI is not painful at all these days as xorg.conf is automatic for pretty much everything... dual GPU can require a few manual lines to point the display server in the right direction but that's way better than it used to be.
dmenu instead of unity launcher, then pick your window manager e.g i3wm... done.
dmenu instead of unity launcher, then pick your window manager e.g i3wm... done.
Personally, I like Cinnamon as my desktop-environment when using Linux. It's clean and tasteful, without being too dumbed-down or anything. Too bad the version in 16.04's repos is, at least for now, still quite broken -- every time I install removable media something goes wonky with the desktop and the icons I have there. Still, even as-is, Cinnamon sure beats Unity in usability IMHO.
This is news? Really?
Maybe this is interesting to that group of people who have not yet figured out that Ubuntu is garbage, but general news? I don't think so. Let those that still have not found their way away from Ubuntu get their Ubuntu-specific news from a Ubuntu news outlet and stop bothering the rest of us with this crap, 'mkay?
It all makes perfect sense when you think about who has been responsible for most software UIs developed over the past 5 to 10 years: hipsters.
Let's clear up a few misconceptions to begin with. Firstly, "hipster" isn't just some vague scapegoat. It's a well-defined culture that places emphasis on design, on style, on trendiness, on being different just for the sake of being different, of putting appearance over usability, and of the practitioner having an unhealthily large ego. Secondly, as it's a culture, hipsters can be of any age. Thirdly, normal people find hipsters extremely distasteful, and normal people will go out of their way not to deal with hipsters, even if this means changing careers.
So the situation is this: from the advent of computing up until the mid 2000s, user interfaces were designed and developed by professionals. They had the best interests of their user in mind. Then around 2005 we started to see hipsters flood into the software UI field. This was initially due to the failing of the print media industry, where they had mainly been isolated before. As they collectively moved to web design and software UI design, they quickly drowned out and drove out the professionals who had given us practical, usable UIs.
These hipsters believe that the always know what's best for the user. It's not a matter of asking the user what they want, or getting feedback, or performing studies about how users use the UIs. When it comes to hipster-designed UIs, they always know exactly what's right, even when it's totally wrong in practice. If a UI doesn't work well for a user, it's not the broken UI that's at fault, it's the user, at least according to hipsters. This is why we've seen numerous UI disasters from hipsters, including Firefox, GNOME 3, Chrome, Windows 8 and 10, Unity, and Slashdot Beta.
A lot of the UI problems we encounter today would have been inconceivable in 2000, back when professionals ran the show and did the work. But that's because, at the time, we didn't realize just how backward things would get with hipsters involved. We didn't realize that there were some people (hipsters) who were so sure of themselves that they would essentially tell users to "fuck off and die" when these users brought legitimate complaints about the UIs to the table. As professionals the thought of putting the user second to ourselves never even crossed our mind. While we worked for the users, the hipsters work for themselves and the satisfaction of their own "creative needs" at the expense of the user.
Until the hipsters either leave the industry (because it has become "untrendy"), or until are driven out for the way they've treated users and professional UI designers so awfully, we will be continually subjected to terrible UIs that fail in the most basic of ways.
While I fully agree that all gui elements should be movable, I really don't get why anyone still thinks that menu/task bars should be on the bottom. Every laptop or desktop monitor since like forever has a cinema aspect ratio, so vertical pixels are at a premium. Why waste them on stuff outside the active window? I cringe every time someone decides to present a document in some meeting, leaving the taskbar at the bottom (and the app's ribbon visible at the top), with room for maybe a paragraph at a time visible.
Just because teh first time you saw a Windows taskbar it was on the bottom is no reason to think it makes any sense to leave it there.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Unity sucks donkey wang. I download Ubuntu Gnome then install gnome-flashback to get back a traditional desktop.
Kubuntu is not perfect. But it is massively more customizable than unity, gnome, and cinnamon.
You want your task bar at the left, right, top, bottom, multiple of those at once, big, small, one total, one per monitor, you can have it. You want it showing iconified programs from just this desktop, from all desktops, from all desktops+all monitors, you can have it. You want to totally rearrange what's in the bar, you can do. You want to pick focus follows mouse, or click to focus, or several other policies, you can do. You want your windows to start on a given screen, or with a given size, you can do. It goes on and on: things other desktops ram down your throat "their way", KDE lets you configure.
KDE is really the way to go on Linux if you want a desktop that hasn't been totally eviscerated by idiots.
I have been a computer guru for 40 years, and the problem with this is ... I don't even know how to do this anymore. Sure I have been messing with Linux since it came on disks in PC Magazine, and downloaded distributions from BBS sites. Have compiled kernels and configured X. I have even written X based software. Sure, I could figure out how to do it.
But I don't care!
I installed Mint Cinnamon, and I'm done. I don't want a minimal install, because then I have to spend hours in apt-get or Synaptic or something looking for everything that should be there and isn't. Hard disk space is cheap. I install about everything and just turn off what I don't want to use. If I want it later, it's there and already partially configured.
All of this stuff was fun once. I would spend DAYS getting it just the way I wanted it, and then some new release would come out I wanted, which wouldn't install because I had changed stuff so that the installer got confused, or some bug was uncovered and something I needed didn't work. After you get used to something and then stuff doesn't work anymore because some patch you needed put stuff back to the default settings, or broke a dependency.
So for me, Ubuntu is broken and I don't want to fix it. I use Mint as a desktop, Ubuntu as a development server because it always has current stuff, and Cent OS for Enterprise reliability because it's bulletproof.
Canonical has started the recent years to make decisions and remove options on behalf of the users, something which Microsoft is known for. When you run OS X, you can place the docker where you like, not so with Ubuntu Unity - the window controllers are hard coded, you can't switch left/right as it used to.
Now that finally the "launcher" can be placed at the bottom (left aligned, not centered) should be news? /. - right, it's /.
1) if it's news, then it's pathetic
2) if it's not news, why does is appear on
FYI: 16.04 will be the first LTS for Ubuntu MATE.
I've been using Ubuntu Mate 15.10. It's more polished than XFCE and Mint MATE, and it looks better than Unity or anything GNOME3-based.
I suspect that a large percentage of Ubuntu/Gubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint users will switch to Ubuntu MATE when they find out it exists.
--
If you accidentally downloaded the vanilla ISO with Unity:
# apt-get install -y mate-desktop
Then logout, choose MATE at the login menu, enter your password, and enjoy a better desktop environment. Once you're sure you can get rid of Unity with:
# apt-get purge -y unity*
When a simple GUI option is turned into a news-worthy event.
Isn't Unity just a compiz plugin?
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
"...the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories"
Wow, such innovation, being able to move the launcher to the bottom of the screen. OMFG we're living in the FUTURE!!!!
Where will all this forward-thinking and amazing creativity end? Who knows what amazing ideas they'll come up with next- maybe being able to change the color of the desktop background, or making the background a picture??
The mind boggles at all these incredible new features. I mean, being able to put the launcher at the bottom...will wonders never cease??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The fact that such a trivial customization is newsworthy tells you just how bad Unity is. There is nothing special about having a user defined layout of the desktop. Many other distros have provided such user freedom and Ubuntu did too in the past. But now the default desktop is Unity which goes out of it's way to take away user choice in the name of "unifying" the desktop between laptops and phones. Yes, you will have the same desktop and it will be crippled everywhere.
I like Ubuntu as an operating system. It's stable (if you use the LTS version), has the best and fastest security updates and is the Linux OS with the best hardware compatibility. But I can't tolerate Unity. So when I install Ubuntu, the first change I make is to go to the Ubuntu Software Center and search for xfce4 (the current xfce desktop) and install "Meta-package for the Xfce Lightweight Desktop Environment". This will let you choose which desktop you want each time you log on. You can use Unity where that is your preference and switch to Xfce when you want.
Xfce lets you define the exact size and positions of all panels. You can have docking panels on the sides, top, bottom.... wherever you want. But the best thing about Xfce is that it lets you create desktop launchers of your own. Just right click on the desktop, choose application launcher, url link, or file manager folder. And these launchers can be dragged to the panels you have created and docked there. Gnome used to let you do that, but no more. As far as I can determine, Xfce is the only desktop that empowers the user in such a useful way.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
WTF? Seriously, with any decent X11 window manager (I use fvwm), this is a configuration setting where you specify the position. Have they implemented a non-conforming X11 application for this "launcher" and crippled it thereby?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Personally, I like Cinnamon as my desktop-environment when using Linux. It's clean and tasteful, without being too dumbed-down or anything.
Same here....I like Mint's look and I agree, it's clean and tasteful. It's also a straightforward and uncluttered design, looks very nice.
I've not seen the issue you mention with removable media but then I don't do a lot of that, mostly USB drives.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
All of this stuff was fun once. I would spend DAYS getting it just the way I wanted it
Yeah, I was like that too, way back when. :) I loved configuring and tweaking everything, getting it just the way I wanted it....
But it gets old and tedious after a while, and these days I have stuff I have to get done. No more time or interest in fiddling with all that shit just to get it the way I want.
I put Mint on my laptop and everything worked right out of the box, no problem whatsoever. Everything worked and the desktop is just about perfect for me. The only thing I did was resize the icons to be a bit smaller and install Docky for a launcher, and I was done.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
who woulda thunk it? a GUI giving users what they want is ... newsworthy? has it come to this? imma gonna kill myself
For my media boxes I went with the Cairo dock. It's good for a situation with a small number of apps but can also scale up nicely.
Personally though I still prefer to use it with KDE (you can just remove the main dock) as opposed to Gnome though.
I have been a computer guru for 40 years, and the problem with this is ... I don't even know how to do this anymore
Feel free to not burden with it, really. But on debian/ubuntu it's very easy : you apt-get install xorg, alsa (alsa-base and alsa-utils), a bare desktop such as lxde or xfce4 - bare enough to not come with a pdf reader and a CD-R burner, but still with the configuration GUIs, perhaps a basic selection of themes and in lxde's case a text editor and image viewer etc.
It all sets up automatically and if you install a login manager (either at the same time or after), to not have to run 'startx', that sets up itself too.
Then you get to do petty choices about pdf reader, media players etc. (for example why have totem player installed in the first place if you'll close it every time it gets launched).
The work and how to replicate it mostly consists in the list of packages you want to apt-get install.
That said I use Mint too and that needs really few changes.
I used or tested tha "manual" method above (with quotes, because how automatized it is) with debian squeeze, Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 12.04, debian wheezy. Mostly good on old or very weak hardware although would have I a need for straight Ubuntu (non-LTS, need to install from network) I would do that.
The command to move it for the bottom works in the live environment, in case you want to try it.
In any WM/desktop I've use I've always had the launcher at the bottom. The fact that Unity now has it makes me very happy.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Does audio consistently work in Linux yet?
Sure! I know a guy who says it works perfectly and everyone is fucking retarded because they didn't buy a discrete soundcard with the ONE TROO AUDIO CHIPSET.
Desktop Linux: Party like it's 1995!
But you ignored his whole post. The initial install is indeed very easy. But later, when things break, when there is an obscure or unique bug, when an updated subsystem borks half the easy installer options, then it all is so much offal pie. Why eat that when you can have a big juicy steak with none of the work to make it tasty?
I hope they like Unity and the users it brings.
I used to use Ubuntu back before it started forcing things upon me. When Unity came, I was like "meh, I'll use fallback Gnome2". Then the assholes had the nerve to forcefully uninstall that fallback for the next upgrade.
I jumped ship and at the time was selling computers in a retail setting. I told every single person who would listen about how much Ubuntu was crap for forcing something upon us.
Fast forward and it looks like they are finally starting to realize a bit of customization is needed before turning all the users away.
Funny because you had a unique way to somehow capture a Slackware/Debian/Gentoo user with a blend of mainstream + power yet you took the power back when Unity came and watched us all run back to our parent Distros....
I can't wait until Ubuntu is shut down or fails more publicly. It's a shining example of business practices that should land you out on the street.
What Canonical needs to focus on is fixing their upgrade process and broken packages. Buggy packages in LTS releases don’t get bug fixes, so we’re forced to upgrade servers to non-LTS releases just to get things working properly. And basically everyone who upgraded to 15.10 got a broken system until they realized that the upgrade did not install a new kernel, instead leaving you with one that caused all kinds of crashes due to a mismatch between kernel and userspace libraries and services.
Now if they would only deign to once again allow us mere users (and actual owners of the hardware) to decide where we want the window buttons (i.e. on the right like pretty much every other frikin GUI in the world).
Stick with Xfce.
Thanks for clarifying that. In my mind crazy customizations aren't really needed (if it e.g. amounts to a configuration file for the window manager in $HOME, I can't see how that would go wrong). /etc. I can see that sort of thing opening such can of worms (small or not I don't know), I never had to do that in the bad old days and can cheat around that by using pcmanfm (totally DE-independant file manager that mounts the drives on its own). CUPS may be fine.
Like custom versions of software, or adding stuff like Pulseaudio or NetworkManager to your dekstop session - here I would use the PC with Alsa only and install wicd instead. Setting up a daemon to automount USB drives?, with some custom config in
Yea those considerations above are mostly irrelevant. But I believe it can be easy if you have fewer features rather than more, and you can enable/disable features or daemons the idiot way by using apt-get install and apt-get remove.
New OS version? which is when software is changed. Start over or baby-sit the dist-upgrade.
Maybe next time they will allow me to move the window buttons to the right.
Whoa, there are still people using the Unity environment? Poor sods... "Wha, our product does not look lik an Apple product. We must change it, so that it looks more like an Apple product..." *barf*
Good question. First you should ask yourself why there is a whole separate distribution just to support a different desktop. Xubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu and is identical in most ways. But after copying most of Ubuntu, it's developers make a big deal out of changing the desktop. If they put all their effort into just perfecting that Xfce desktop on Ubuntu instead of being diverted by supporting the management of a separate distribution, they might have the time and resources to do a better job.
We have had a recent lesson in this fallacy in the case of Mint. Mint is also a copy of Ubuntu and it exists primarily as a platform for the Cinnamon desktop. But because they were slow to handle security problems, Mint was hacked and code compromised. I don't trust Mint to this day. So I suggest starting with a secure and solid Ubuntu base and just perfect your desktop on that distro.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
vtwm is 26 years old, rock stable for more than 15 years, lightweight, handles virtual display space flawlessly to expand your workspace with only one monitor, and runs on every X based system since 1990. It's not in the major distros because it's too lightweight, fast, and stable for the Gnome and KDE and Wayland fanboys.
The tools to RPM package it for all RPM based releases are at https://github.com/nkadel/vtwm.... Enjoy!
Unity should have been based on KDE with several newly added widgets to make it more Unity-like.
A retard has spoken.
Captcha: stupid
Because Xubuntu users want to have only the Xfce desktop, without having to install the Unity desktop first, which, if you're never going to use it, means you're just wasting hard disk space.
What an odd point of view. Linux Mint got hacked through Wordpress running on its web site. They weren't "slow to handle security problems"; they dealt with it as soon as they found out about it, which was almost immediately. And If you had checked the MD5 checksum of the hacked ISO, you would have seen that there was a problem with it.
As its leader, Clement Lefebvre, wrote in response to a comment on his blog, "...we’ll probably also contract a security firm to look into the bottom of this for us, we’re software developers not intrusion experts."
Take your idea to its logical extreme, and we would just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments. Nobody wants that, except you, maybe.
Good reason... Changing the user interface engenders no less upheaval than changing the programming interfaces. Canonical realizes this, so they insist the name of the OS should provide at least a clue to the user. The UI is part of the identity of the OS in the eyes of users and app developers.
Why should Canonical "perfect" Xfce in their distro? Its not their vision for how their OS should look and behave, and standalone "DE" projects do not get that level of vertical integration (in fact, they form out of resistance to it).
Sorry canonical I just don't like the interface to begin with. Why not focus on making quality hardware for Linux? We need a high quality Linux laptop in 2016 to compete with the Apple MacBook Pro. Just include the cost of the software in the price of the hardware and rake in the millions (billions?). I would buy a laptop like that. Bonus points if you have an option to have hardware that supports a fully GNU compliant driver stack.
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. -Alan Kay"
This is a typical example of what can happen when you turn your project over to designers and let them have their way with it. When I first started using Unity I hated it, specifically for not being able to move the launcher to the bottom of the screen. The best answer as to why I couldn't do this was that it was a "design decision" - in other words total fucking bullshit. I tolerated Unity for several years and then decided to switch to another distro entirely. Yes I can Xfce on Ubuntu but why would I want to use a product made by a company justifies fucking their users over because of design decisions? Too little, too late Canonical.
You do know Xubuntu is Ubuntu right down to the package repositories, right? Calling it a separate distro is quite a stretch. The rest of your comment doesn't apply to Xubuntu, it's not a separate distro, while Mint is.
"Since Xubuntu uses the same software repositories as Ubuntu, the areas of development between Ubuntu and Xubuntu developers partly overlap. The main difference is that Xubuntu developers mostly work on packages that are directly related to Xubuntu." - http://xubuntu.org/contribute/development/
Anyway, always make sure you know and understand it before posting about it.
... All of this stuff was fun once. I would spend DAYS getting it just the way I wanted it, and then some new release would come out I wanted, which wouldn't install because I had changed stuff so that the installer got confused...
I know what you mean, and i'm definitely not a fan of having to spend hours configuring things, i'm not one of those people who wants to "get everything just how i want it" sacrificing hours or days in the process... however i am a fan of being minimal, not because of hard disk space or anything... i'm happy to install away loads of space, my problem is i don't want to crowd my workspace... i'm perfectly happy running a usable tiling window manager and dmenu and that's it... i get fed up of big desktop UIs full of crap that usually annoys me... and if I need to install a new system pretty much all i need to worry about for my UI is to install two packages, maybe copy one config but the defaults are pretty good for i3... i like well thought out defaults, makes deployment quick.
Same here, Mint all the way and as a bonus it works on HP notebooks that only come with UEFI BIOS. Basically Mint rock!
>>> ..... just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments.
Maybe that would mean that people were actually working on productive products and variants, instead of expending effort reinventing the wheel? Maybe that would prove, beyond any doubt, just how much better the Linux concept of interchangeable layers can be (as opposed to the monolithic Windows model)?
Because Xubuntu users want to have only the Xfce desktop, without having to install the Unity desktop first, which, if you're never going to use it, means you're just wasting hard disk space.
Well, it can just be uninstalled. Or you can do it like other distros do and ask which one you want to have installed during the installation.
I use the mouse a lot to switch between applications. Having the launcher locked at the left side of the screen means it's either inconveniently far away from my mouse pointer when it's on the opposite screen or I have to waste space duplicating it on both monitors. It also wouldn't work well with auto-hiding in a vertical orientation cause there's no left screen edge on the right monitor for me to brush the mouse up against to show the menu. Allowing the launcher to be on the bottom solves all of these problems and it doesn't take up any of that precious vertical real-estate. I use OSX the exact same way (at the bottom and with auto-hide). If you want to argue that no sane person should be primarily using the mouse to switch applications and state that I should be using the keyboard to overcome any issues this causes me, you are clearly alienating the "linux anyone can use" vibe that ubuntu has going for it.